It’s back to the river system again. Pluses are calm fresh waters and little reason for weather postponements. Negatives are no auto pilot, must be on alert for human powered watercraft, small boats, no wake zones and of course, the locks! Traveled further up the Hudson River, past Albany to Troy, NY passed through the Federal Lock and shortly thereafter you meet the proverbial fork in the road / river. Stay to the right and you travel to Lake Champlain, the Richelieu River, and Montreal. Go left and you are almost immediately stopped by the first lock of the Erie Canal! We went left and entered the “flight of locks”; six consecutive locks, some as close as 1/10th mile, rising some 400 feet in only a few miles.

Similar to the locks of the TN River Valley; however, these locks do not have floating bollards. Instead, you either grab ahold of a slimy hanging rope and tie it to a cleat on your boat or you loop your own dock line around a vertical cable, secure it to your boat and glide along the cable. After one try of the dirty ropes, I opted for my own lines at the second lock. This worked very well except for one thing. The rise of the lock is to the top of the sill (the very top of the lock wall) not several feet shy of it like all previous locks. Tie your line too closely to the vertical cable without sufficient slack and you risk that your boat will be impaled to the wall! Ask me, I know! Thankfully I had my knife with me and quickly cut the tighter-than-a- banjo-string dock line. Henceforth, I use the entire length of a 15’ dock line with plenty of slack. No issues.

We didn't know how far we would travel today so after clearing lock 7 (there is no number 1 lock) we decided to find refuge. We found it at the Schenectady Yacht Club. At nice little club along the Mohawk River and next to the original Erie Canal. Remnants of the aqueduct which fed water to the canal are visible to our west. Evidently, the canal was carved into the landscape and water was fed to it via aqueducts. It would have taken 22 locks in the original canal to have traveled the seven (including Federal Lock on the Hudson) locks we traveled today.

We push on again tomorrow - Amsterdam, NY or beyond.